durbn.net

darkadept: @joshgiesbrecht glad to be of service. =)

darkadept: @joshgiesbrecht KSnapshot lets you pick Section of Window, Full Screen, Window Under Cursor, Region,or Current Screen. Window decor optional

darkadept: @joshgiesbrecht ksnapshot is awesome fore KDE (just press PrtScn key). Gnome has something like it to (main menu->apps->access->take screen)

darkadept: @Lt_Dan GROAN!

darkadept: Got a profile at @failings, the site that lets friends give me completely anonymous feedback! http://failin.gs/profile/darkadept

darkadept: If you are into ebooks check out kobo http://ur1.ca/wogp. They are busy signing deals with tons of publishing companies. http://ur1.ca/wogh.

darkadept: I'm no fan of Flash but Steve Jobs is an idiot. Adobe gives up with trying to get Flash onto the iPhone/iPad: http://ur1.ca/wj21

Part of my mandate as a teacher of Principles of Mathematics 12 (ie. roughly Precalc, for you Americans) includes teaching mathematical modeling.  My textbook is filled with little subsections that boldly proclaim, “MODELING!”.  It’s one of the mathematical processes that are supposed to be woven together across all of the curriculum content I’m covering.

I am wrapping up a unit on trig functions and it’s time to hook into the “MODELING REAL-WORLD SITUATIONS” content.  Now, I personally have a serious love-hate relationship with trig functions.  Being a graduate of a computer engineering program means I’ve seen them a LOT in my formal education.  Trig integrals have nearly killed me on multiple occasions.  On the other hand, playing with trig functions in an electronics lab is awesome, and being able to visually comprehend trig graphs is probably the only reason I managed to pass a course on Communication Systems.  So part of me really, really wants them to get this.

But there’s one big problem: when I look through the textbook for real-world, all I see is textbook perfection.  The opener they use is tide-level data from Nova Scotia – except that they’ve stripped the real data down to this:

This is a complete and utter fabrication.  That sine wave is friggin’ perfect.

Here’s the reality.

Messy peaks that don’t always line up.  Some kind of weird alternating pattern hiding in them as well that totally makes sense if you stop for a second and think about how far the earth has turned in 12h.

You know what?  It’s not perfect, it’s reality.  And our model, based on a single sinusoid, is never ever going to match that reality perfectly.  And that’s just fine, but for some reason the textbook seems deathly afraid of letting students realize this.  The really ironic bit is that the real data is already incredibly close to the model, and yet they still couldn’t bring themselves to let students deal with even a tiny bit of messy reality.

So that’s what led me to this.  I’ll just start off by saying this image probably only scores a C on the WCYDWT rubric but somehow this kind of worked anyway.

(source: Steam Game and Player statistics)

Opening question was an obvious one: “Which part of the graph do you notice first?”

After students pointed out the weird downward spike in the middle, I moused over that part and talked a bit about the numbers and what this was graphing.  (The site this image comes from has that graph in a Flash applet that gives exact values when you mouseover the graph.)  The story went something like this:

This graph shows the number of users connected to the online PC gaming service Steam over the past 48 hours.  That spike in users online probably represents about 500,000 really ticked-off customers who can’t get at their online game.

We can see they got people back online pretty quickly.  Which is good, because you don’t want to give 500,000 ticked-off time to start posting on forums on a Sunday afternoon.  YOU DON’T WANT TO ANGER THE INTERWEBS.

So imagine you’re working at Steam.  It’d be really nice to have some kind of system that alerts you automatically when something like this happens, because you don’t want to be at the office all weekend watching this.

So, ignoring the programming for now and just thinking about the math … how can we come up with a system that catches this?

Brainstorming session ensued!  Ideas – great ideas! – came from the room and hit the whiteboard.  We started off with four big ideas that were just point-form statements:

• goes down too quickly
• drops below a threshold
• below the avg for that time of day
• doesn’t fit the pattern

This made me so happy.  From there we turned some of these into something we could calculate; we talked about turning these ideas into “math”.  One thing I loved about this brainstorm is that the third item on the list was outside the scope of the class, but at least as good of a solution as what I was guiding them to.

Then we unpacked the big one: “doesn’t fit the pattern”.  What pattern? Can we model it?  Cue discussion / lecture on trig graphing where I showed them how to construct a sinusoidal model, and afterward we checked how accurate it was.  (Not very, but probably enough to fit our task of catching a large drop in user connectivity.)

My own evaluation?  This lesson isn’t a great WCYDWT – it required a lot of me talking, and I had to do some storytelling.  The question wasn’t short.  It got students participating who weren’t normally confident of their skills, but it didn’t get everyone involved.

But I had students asking, nearly begging me at the start of class to wrap up before 7pm to catch the Canucks game.  This lesson went straight through to 7:15 and they didn’t even notice until they were a couple minutes into individual work afterward.  Something must have gone right.

darkadept: @joshgiesbrecht It's from Battlefield 1942. @Lt_Dan yeah meatgrinder! I should install that game again...i'm sure it works under linux.

darkadept: @Lt_Dan excellent! I was hoping someone would catch that.

darkadept: @joshgiesbrecht Allons-y!!!!!!

As per Dan Meyer’s curriculum approach: What Can You Do With This?

Live data is at http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ but this image matters.

Edit: The full story is here.

darkadept: @dustinsreimer By "poor form" i'll take it you mean down right hilarious. oh yeah, i'm awesome.

darkadept: Quote from slashdot comment: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me dozens of times, I'm an Apple customer."

darkadept: hmm forgot about my 1tb external hdd for my wii. That makes it 7tb of storage on my home network. nice.

Normally when my brain cross-links game design and education, I try to temper my enthusiasm by remembering that I like to relate nearly everything to games at some point, somehow, and not everyone else has this disease.  But I can’t let this one go.

I’m going to attempt to write about difficulty in game design then talk a bit about the Super Meat Boy design process, namely when it comes to how we approached dealing with difficulty. …

Dealing with difficulty is one of the key challenges I face every time I bring a math lesson into my classroom.  This kind of design analysis gets my attention.

I’ll skip over drawing comparisons to the history of platformer design and the history of mathematics education, but the parallels are there, at least in the caricatured form you hear when teachers gripe.  (“…back before the make-it-fun-and-easy crowd got a hold of the curriculum”, etc)

How could we make a seemingly aggravatingly difficult game into something fun that the player could get lost in?

This is what I can’t let go. This is the question I stare down when I start to question how I’m presenting that next lesson.  This is the question that makes me rethink what I’m doing when I’m writing the next big unit test.

Go, read the article if you haven’t yet.  Then come back.

It’s when I start to look at the solution to the design problem that I suspect Edmund McMillen has it easier than we do in the classroom.

Here are the key points to summarize:

1. Keep it small.
2. Keep the action constant.
3. Reward success.
4. Extend the challenge as people master the basics.

How many of these could be applied to the classroom to improve things?  Where does it break down?  (I’ve got some ideas but let’s get some discussion going in the comments first.)

darkadept: Preordered the Kobo eReader from Chapters yesterday. It's supposed to ship on May 3rd. It's the start of my foray into e-readers.

darkadept: Need a crossplatform way to provide remote desktop support for your parents? Check out TeamViewer (www.teamviewer.com) Works thru firewalls!

darkadept: Yay, I have an estimated total of 6 terrabytes of storage in my house.

darkadept: I am seriously considering getting the Kobo eReader (http://ur1.ca/twyt) Only $150 bucks from Chapters. (out in May 2010)